Author: Lynnette Hicks

Goal Setting Worksheet:

Get Organised:

Organizing your future goal setting worksheets will help you not just to list all your goals in a more organize way, but arrange them visually for easier reference. For most of the time people are in need of something to arrange their thoughts and frame of mind. A goal setting worksheet is exactly created for this particular need.

Employee Goal Setting:

If you are a boss or a manager and you have ambitious plans to accelerate the overall development and progress of your company or team, the first thing you would logically do is to make sure your employees are on the same wave length with the same ideals as you are.

The company would not move forward and achieve goals and targets if the team players, the workers or employees that make up the group are not participating or cooperating whole-heartedly.

Identify the Areas of Need:

It is common for institute-initiated professional goal setting to include the identification of area that needs development for the betterment of the company and the individual. This area is then put into focus, and relates it to the individual concerned, without losing sight on the constantly evolving needs for individual career planning. The impact of this group planning to an individual is just astounding.This aspect is closely related with career, so both the company and the individual need to be taken into account as one cannot prosper without the other.An end result needs to develop and immerge with a goal serving these two side by side.

Potential Development:

Perhaps some of your talents and skills need future improvement, or are maybe already clamoring for an improvement. Life, after all, is discovering your potential and developing it in the process.By setting long and short term goals, it will be easier to achieve your future goals as they have been idetinfied, written down and are easily accessible whenever they need revising, revisiting, reaffirming and actioning.

Whenever there is a need to review any of its components they just can be simply changed as they are not cast in stome!

Purpose:

Since the very purpose of goal setting is to be achievable, your goals should be challenging enough to stimulate you but realistic enough so as not to discourage you in the end. For instance, you want to set a goal for your personal growth, as a person and as a professional.By measuring progress and development in one endeavour, you are given the chance to improve and do more when the gauge indicates there are still more effort needed.

Failure:

Another importance of goal setting techniques and measures is opening you to the possibility of failure. By being open about the idea, you become more open minded and receptive to the various and possible causes of pending failures.We all need to ‘Fail’ so that we may ‘Learn’ by our mistakes.Just like a toddler who falls down and gets up on his feet again when learning to walk, we have to adapt the same attitude to our goals in life.Failing is not a terrible thing if we learn from it. Only when we don’t learn a lesson is it a useless exercise.

Good luck with your goal setting session and make it one of many.Remember to revisit your goals regularly – they will stay fresh in your mind and keep you aware of your dreams!

We can all struggle sometimes to achieve our goals whether its business or personal. Whenever you set a goal and you find yourself struggling keep in mind the word SMART. SMART is an acronym that can be used to help evaluate and add structure to your goals. SMART stands for :-

Specific

Measurable

Actionable

Relevant

TimeBased

SMART begins with asking yourself “how specific is a goal?

Specific: This is probably the most important part of establishing or evaluating a goal. The less specific a goal is the more difficult it is to determine how long the goal should take to complete or how to measure success.

Consider the difference between a goal to get healthy versus the goal to lose weight versus the goal to lose 10 kg. The goal to get healthy is much less specific than a goal to lose 10 kg!

Measurable -The next question to ask is “How will I know if I am achieving my goal?” “How is the goal measured?” What determines success? Some goals may be best measured by a simple yes-or-no, like running a marathon, while other goals are better measured by using metrics such as the goal to specifically lose 10 kg.

The key to measurement is making sure that in whatever way the goal is measured, it accurately reflects success. For instance, if you do not have access to a scale then measuring weight loss will be difficult and less accurate, but an alternative measure may be to track how many inches you have lost around the waist. But, to what extent does this accurately reflect the goal?

Without access to a reliable way of measuring weight, we may want to consider buying a scale or restructuring our goal.

Actionable is not asking yes or no, but how will the goal be achieved? What is our action plan? Do we have the resources and capabilities required to achieve success? If not what do we need? Well-designed goals provide clarity of action. If the actions required to achieve a goal are unclear or there are a large number of actions that need to be taken, we should consider breaking down the main goal into manageable, actionable sub-goals. In isolation any single goal is relevant, but in life we most often are in the process of pursuing multiple goals and having too many goals at the same time.

Relevant: We need a tool to help us track our goals to make sure we are pursuing our most relevant goals at any given moment in time.One technique is to place goals in a matrix that looks at effort required versus perceived value of achieving the goal. Not always, but most of the time we will want to focus our energy on low effort high value goals.

Another technique is to use the Pareto Principle, also known as the 80/20 rule. Ask, which are the 20% of goals that will provide me with 80% of my return?

Time: We need to include a specific date by which a goal should be accomplished, it helps provide incentive and allows us to monitor progress. Consider the difference between the goal to lose 10 kg and the goal to lose 10 kg in 10 weeks. Simply by including an element of time we can now calculate how much we should be losing each week, and if after 5 weeks we have only lost 1 kg, we can revisit our action plan and ramp it up.

Goal setting is an on-going process of action, evaluation, and revision. It is not about lowering goals or standards to ensure success it is about recognizing goals are dynamic, because life is dynamic. We do not live in a static world. Life happens. A goal that is relevant today may be irrelevant tomorrow.

When using SMART, stay flexible and motivated by setting aside time to re-evaluate your goals on a regular basis.